Lean Manufacturing Solutions
Wasted time, wasted materials, labour, space, movement and poor quality are what we try to remove for customers who use our skilled applications engineers. Experience learned first-hand at the coal-face of manufacturing and assembly operations enables us to understand your concerns, and helps us develop Lean solutions for you, our customer.
The FlowStore Systems team has more than 30 years’ experience in applying our products to improve efficiency in assembly systems, manufacturing cells and order picking. So our skilled team is particularly well placed to offer you the support and advice you require as you seek continual improvement by implementing Lean Manufacturing principles in the workplace.
Assembly Systems and Ergonomic Workstations
FlowTube workstations and workbenches are proving to be increasingly popular, especially for use in a Lean environment. A key element of FlowStore workstation design is to meet the ergonomic requirements of health and safety for a variety of staff who need to use the same equipment, but perhaps are on different shifts.
Using manual hydraulic, mechanical or electric powered height-adjustable legs systems, FlowStore provide for employees who are of different heights by providing quickly adjustable frameworks. With adjustable supporting legs, the whole bench, trolley or workstation can be quickly reset to suit different staff requirements.
Ergonomic Solutions
Alternatively FlowStore also has a manual height-adjustable worktop or table top in its range, where only part of the workstation moves up or down.
This simple solution can be beneficial where an assembly or inspection process requires the operator to raise or lower the item being worked on, to obtain optimum working height for certain parts of the process.
This now means that both assembly stations and worktops can be built for different activities and operators. Pre-set height adjustment ranges can also be set.
Automation Solutions
FlowStore has provided a variety of solutions in the manufacturing sector to help implement the “smart factory”. We have worked with various system integrators and end users to help develop aspects of Industry 4.0 in today’s manufacturing companies.
Our key focus is to help industries achieve continual improvement by running more Leanly; the aim is to achieve reduced waste and costs coupled with improved productivity and quality. This is at the heart of a Lean Manufacturing environment.
Efficient Parts and Order Picking
Good visual presentation of parts to pickers goes hand-in-hand with shaving off precious seconds from assembly and picking operations, and reducing errors. We have 30 years’ experience of honing pick face designs to best suit your production system.
7 Forms of Waste
Use the adaptability of our FlowTube modular system to shape assembly processes to their optimum. Our sales engineers can help you optimise your operations from their own experience in assembly lines to help assist in eliminating the seven forms of waste.
Lean master Shigeo Shingo documented the Toyota Production System’s seven forms of waste which need strategic solutions because they are believed to hinder progress in an organisation.
They are found to be in: overproduction, unnecessary transportation, inventory, movement, defects, over-processing and waiting. It is important in Lean Manufacturing for these wastes to be identified and eliminated in order to improve productivity and performance.
Project Management
Managing projects effectively and constructively marks out FlowStore as the team to trust. This is not only for large or complicated applications, but also for any clients who want consistent standards of safety, design coherence and repeatability, where even smaller details are attended to.
1
We appoint a project manager according to the type of requirement, covering various areas including design, commercial, contractual, factory and site assembly and commissioning.
2
We will ensure site staff are Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) certificated, and follow relevant HSE standards.
3
Where required they will attend site meetings and manage the overall project to ensure key milestones are met and that any variance is promptly recorded and reported.
4
Where our equipment interfaces with others, be it AGVs, conveyors or other manual or automated systems, we carefully review to satisfy you, our client, that we have the necessary information and know-how to achieve the desired result. Where we have doubts, we will be open.
5
Providing 3-D designs from our Solidworks CAD package and exporting to clients’ systems in various file formats will enable you to ensure our equipment fits the bill. At the completion of our phase of any scheme, our equipment will be inspected and tested, signed off by our project manager and handed over to the client.
6
We progress and keep any non-conformity records, ensuring that issues arising have been robustly corrected, using continual improvement (CI) methods as part of our own Lean Manufacturing commitment.
International Top Brands Served By Flowstore
